Understanding Dante's Comedy As Virtuous Friendship
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religions Article Understanding Dante’s Comedy as Virtuous Friendship Matthew Rothaus Moser Department of Theology, Loyola University Maryland, Baltimore, MD 21210, USA; [email protected] Received: 5 February 2019; Accepted: 20 March 2019; Published: 22 March 2019 Abstract: As Dante explains in his epistle to Can Grande, the purpose of the Comedy is to move the reader from a state of misery to a state of happiness. The poet himself testifies that the poem was written as a work of moral philosophy oriented to the achievement of happiness, eudaimonia: the beatific vision of God. Moreover, Dante insists on his poem’s efficacy to affect in its readers a similar moral and religious transformation as that which the poem represents through the narrative journey of the pilgrim. To put it another way, Dante represents his poem’s relationship to its reader as a kind of virtuous friendship. This essay sets forth a model for teaching Dante’s poem as an experiment in virtuous friendship that can transform the classroom into a workshop for the philosophical and religious quest for happiness. This involves teaching the text with an eye not only to the content and style of the poem but also to the performative and participatory demands of the text. Beginning with this framework, this essay works out pedagogical strategies for teaching the Comedy as a form of virtuous friendship extended over the centuries between Dante Alighieri and the contemporary reader. Chiefly, I explore ways Dante makes his readers complicit in the pilgrim’s own moral and spiritual journey toward the virtue of hope translated into the practice of prayer through a close, pedagogical reading of Inferno 3, Purgatorio 5, and Paradiso 20. I explore ways that Dante’s use of surprise, shock, misdirection, appeal to mystery, and retreat to silence creates a morally significant aporia of knowledge that serves as a laboratory for readers’ own virtuous transformation. I end with a critical assessment of the challenges involved in understanding the Comedy as virtuous friendship. Keywords: Dante; teaching; virtue; formation; pedagogy; understanding; prayer; hope; friendship; understanding 1. Teaching toward Understanding I begin with what I hope is not a particularly controversial claim. The goal of teaching Dante’s Comedy is to help students “understand” the poem. The difficulty lies in what it means to understand the poem. Is “understanding” equivalent to historical or literary re-construction of the text? Does understanding consist in the ability to rehearse the difference between a Guelph and the Ghibelline, to state what “Virgil” and “Beatrice’ symbolize, and to memorize the logical ordering of Dante’s afterlife? In this essay, I suggest a thicker definition of what it means to teach students how to understand Dante’s Comedy. Following the lead of Rowan Williams, I suggest that “understanding” is best defined as “knowing what to do or say next” (Williams 2014, p. 68). Williams uses the example of a teacher writing a pattern on the chalkboard: “2, 4, 6, 8 ... ”. We understand the pattern when we write “10”. “Understanding” consists, therefore, not only in the acquisition of information, but also in knowing what response this information requires of us. This definition of understanding brings up the possibility of “performative” reading, or what J.L. Austin has called the “perlocutionary effect” of reading—that is, the effect that occurs by means of the Religions 2019, 10, 219; doi:10.3390/rel10030219 www.mdpi.com/journal/religions Religions 2019, 10, 219 2 of 9 text.1 What we might call the “mediation of the book” is an important sub-theme of the Comedy; indeed, it is a theme which reinforces the mediatory role played by the Comedy itself. Thus, the central question of my course’s study of Dante is whether this is a text that we can and will perform to our salvation. If so, what would such a performance look like? I suggest to my students that “understanding” the poem occurs more in and through the particularities of their personal performance of the text by becoming people characterized by virtue, rather than in their ability to rehearse a collection of information about the poem.2 I teach the Comedy as part of my Christian Imagination course, an upper-level theology class that fulfills a core curriculum requirement at my Jesuit university. The “imagination” of the course’s title refers to Charles Taylor’s influential concept of the “social imaginary,” which I gloss (with the help of James K.A. Smith) as a “collection of stories, images, and myths of the good life that shape both our desires and our actions”.3 I pair this term with C.S. Lewis’ brief essay on hermeneutics, “Meditation in a Toolshed” (Lewis 2014). In that essay, Lewis describes the need for two forms of optics: a “looking at” (which he describes as analytical, detached, etc.) and a “looking along” (which he describes as a kind of sympathetic vision; a way of inhabiting a particular way of seeing, of making it your own for a time). My course is a sustained exercise in looking at and looking along a number of different—even competing4—social imaginaries, not in a disinterested and merely academic way, but as a mode of self-knowledge. Thus, the thesis statement of my course is an excerpt from a poem by Dana Gioia, found at the top of the course syllabus: The tales we tell are either false or true, But neither purpose is the point. We weave The fabric of our own existence out of words, And the right story tells us who we are. (Gioia 2012, p.13) The Comedy is one of those social imaginaries that “tells us who we are”—or, perhaps better, invites us to become a certain type of person. To riff once again on Rowan Williams, to understand the Comedy is to “look along it” and to see it as something more than a “phenomenon without any conviction that this [is] a story in which [we] belong” (Williams 2014, p. 71). When we understand the Comedy, we see Dante himself as a virtuous friend whose words put on us a salutary “pressure to respond and continue” the narrative of the pilgrim’s journey of self-knowledge—his poetic and theological construction of himself by means of language—through the performance of the narrative in our own lives.5 I structure my course around this goal of inviting students to a reflective, engaged, and performative reading by adopting the following pedagogical strategies: (1) I assign the entire Comedy. The religious, philosophical, and moral power of the poem emerges most completely and most powerfully when students follow the pilgrim’s entire journey. 1 The Comedy is full of examples of morally significant performative reading. Two examples will make this plain. First, Paolo and Francesca perform their reading unto their damnation: “A Galeotto was the book and he that wrote it. That day we read in it no further” (Inferno 5.137–138) (Alighieri 2000). Second, Statius misreads Virgil and is saved: “Through you I was a poet, through you a Christian” (Purgatorio 22.73) (Alighieri 2004). 2 Arguing thus, I want to resist a pre-mature reification of the Comedy as “literature” (or even as “theology”) by attending to the performative character of the text, emphasizing especially its perlocutionary effect in the reader. See Austin(1975, pp. 100–1). 3 See Smith(2009, p. 66). As a relatively tame example of a “social imaginary” I recall a commercial for the iPad Air that used a variety of images of artistic, athletic, innovative, and adventurous lives played over a monologue from the film Dead Poets Society. With my students I discuss how Apple is sellinga picture of the good lifewhich is meant to shape our desires (both for that life and for the iPad that will help us achieve that life) and our actions (of going out and buying a ne device). 4 For example, we follow Dante with a study of Friedrich Nietzsche and a graphic novel the depicts the Nietzschean imagination: Alan Moore’s Watchmen (Moore 2014.) 5 See Williams(2014, p. 72): “And all this is inseparable from the recognition that we cannot speak about our selves without narrative, without the hinterland of allusion to the time it takes to shape or establish what we can call a self by new utterance, new determinations of who is speaking”. Religions 2019, 10, 219 3 of 9 (2) Even in a lecture-format course (30 students), I create space for consideration, discussion, and debate of Dante’s claims. My aim is to present the classroom as a space for friendly conversation, a workshop for wisdom under Dante’s tutelage. This pedagogical style also animates my decision to host individual oral exams at the end of the semester rather than a written, comprehensive exam. The pilgrim’s moral and spiritual journey is effected through conversation and friendship; so too must our pilgrimage through the poem. (3) I assign weekly reflection journals in which students pick a specific scene from the week’s reading that they find especially important, controversial, disagreeable, or significant. They must then, in 500 words or less, personally interact with the selected text, arguing with it, challenging it, praising it. They must then author a brief response to themselves from Dante. This exercise puts students into direct dialogical relationship with Dante’s poem.6 (4) Students have to read and review a memoir of reading the Comedy which narrates the power of encountering the poem as a living text and Dante as a virtuous friend. (5) Finally, students must write a reflection paper in which they narrate their own “social imaginary” or “picture of the good life” in conversation with the texts of our course.